OpenAI is killing open-source… here’s why

Key Takeaways

So, OpenAI just killed Klein and nobody is talking about this. OpenAI just silently gutted one of the most popular AI coding tools, Klein. They made a secret deal where they poached all of the best people from Klein, leaving the company to die. In this video, I'll explain what exactly happened, what this deal means, the impact on the open source community, and what are the best client alternatives. First off, here is why this actually matters. Klein wasn't just another tool. It was a major pillar of the open- source AI coding community that a lot of people were building on top of. But now at least five people that we know of left client to join OpenAI Codex team. And by the way, these weren't some random employees. This was some of the best talent at Klein. Now, naturally, this leaves the millions of client users with no clear answer on what's next and whether the tool will even survive. Now, to add fuel to the fire, last week the commits on client because it's open source were the lowest since 2024, meaning it signals a big downtrend of development. Less and less comets means less features, less bug fixes, and overall it's just a very bad sign for the future of client. Now, what we're seeing right now with client is actually a very concerning trend in the AI field. And it first started with Scale AI. So, last year, Mark Zuckerberg paid 14 billion for 49% of Scale AI, but this was a, you know, kind of fake deal. It was mainly to poach the CEO Alexander Wang as well as some other people and have them start working at Meta. Now, right after this deal, Google, OpenAI, and XAI all withdrew their contracts with Scale AI because they're providing some data labeling to these other AI research labs. And obviously, they didn't want Zuck to have all their data. So, they canled their contracts with Scale AI. Now, today, Scale is still alive, but they've laid off 14% of their staff. You know, the core people have left, and investors are calling it a zombie company. The second victim of this ruthless strategy was Windsorf which happened also last year where Google paid 2.4 4 billion to poach the Windsor CEO, a co-founder of Winerf and 40 other senior engineers, but without actually acquiring the company. And this is the shitty part. Now, coincidentally, 4 months later, Google launches anti-gravity, which is very similar tool to Windsurf. It literally feels the same. They even left in like the assistant name as in Windsurf accidentally because it was built by the same team. And this is the dirty playbook. take the talent, clone the product and leave the corpse of the company for someone else to buy or to eventually fade away. And this is exactly what's happening to client. Openai is doing the same playbook like Meta and Google. They poached the core team from client but didn't acquire the product or the company which is obviously a major concern for the millions of client users all over the world. But believe it or not, this is not the first issue client has been facing recently. It was already fractured before this aqua hire from OpenAI because the head of AI at Klein was fired. Now shortly after multiple engineers from Klein followed him. They went out the door, left client and magically ended up at OpenAI. So the issues inside of Klein and the team are much worse than people realize. Now you might be thinking, okay, David, what tool should I use now? If client is not headed in the right direction, is there any other coding extension that's open source that's promising and I would say currently the best client alternative out there in my opinion is kilo code. Now there are many reasons but first off Kilo is a supererset of client and root code meaning it's bigger right it has all of their features and more plus the team at kilo code is very committed to staying open source and not selling out like client did and actually they made their commitment public is co-founded by sit this guy and he's actually the co-founder of GitLab and he kept GitLab open source for over a decade and even managed to take the company public without selling out the community so he literally already proved that you can stay open source scaled to 11 billion valuation without closing the door on contributors and without selling out to someone like OpenAI. And now he's doing the exact same thing with Kilo Code where he gave Kilo Code the Apache 2.0 license which means that his commitment to staying open and free is legally binding. And by the way, this strategy is working because Kilo Code is winning right now. They're number one on Open Router in terms of token spent and they're approaching 100 billion tokens in total, which is a big leap ahead everyone else, even Clo. And as of 2026, over 1 million people are actively using Kilo code. And the best part is you can build anything with it. So I contacted the team at Kilo and we agreed to partner on this video. So let me show you how to use Kilo Code to build anything using an open source tool that isn't sending all your data to SAM Ultimate. Let's get started. So it's no secret that one of the best AI models in the world right now is Kim K2.5, which just released a few days ago. I made a full video on that. But what many people don't know is that Kilo code is offering Kim K 2.5 completely for free for the next week. And as you can see, Kim K 2.5 is not some shitty model. This model is literally comparable to Clot 4.5 Opus on many different benchmarks and Kilo Code is giving it to us for free for the next week. So here's what you have to do. Type in Kilo Code into Google or just go to kilo.ai. Very nice and clean domain. And here go to the top right and click on sign up and simply create a free account. Boom. Once you log in, you should be redirected to this page. As you can see, I have a zero credits and I'm on the free plan. So, everything I'm showing you is literally free. Just follow my steps and you'll know how to use Kilo Code to build anything with one of the best AI models for free. So, while others are spending hundreds of dollars on expensive subscriptions, we're going to use Kilo Code, which is an open source tool, to use an open source model, Kim K2.5, and we're going to use all of that completely for free. So, pay attention and follow what I'm about to show you. Okay. The next thing we have to do is open VS Code or your ID of choice. You know, obviously this will work with any of the forks of VS Code, which if you're using them, make sure to use Kilo code as well. So, I'm going to open an empty project. Boom. Let's create a folder project. Open. Now, go to the top right, click on extensions, and type in kilo code. Here we go. It's this one. Kilo code. And just make sure to click on install. I already have it installed, but just a oneclick install. Install. And then click trust. Two buttons you have to click. Very simple, right? So, once you install extension, this sidebar should appear on the left. And by the way, if you have a team, if you're working with other developers on your team, Kilo is offering 30 days for free for the team plan. But anyways, the next thing you have to do is click on the icon right here, which will redirect you to your profile. If you haven't logged in here, make sure to click that. It will open up the browser and it will authenticate so that then you can send a message with some free models. Now, obviously, we want to use Kim K2.5, which is again the best open source model in the world. Might even be the best model overall. It's debatable. But here, just type in Kimmy K2.5. As you can see in the parenthesis, it says free, which means Kilo code isn't charging for it. Right? As you can see, I haven't connected my credit card. I haven't done any API keys. Kilo Code is giving this model for free for the next week. So, there literally has never been a better time to download Kilo code. All right, so let me show you just how powerful Kilo Code really is because um you can do a lot with this free extension. So, the first thing I told it for each project I give you, create a subfolder and build everything in there. So, first of all, go to the bottom left and select code. As you can see, Kilo offers multiple different agents, right? You have the architect, code, ask, debug, orchestrator, and review depending on what part of software engineering you're doing. Right now, I'm going to go straight into code because I have prepared a solid prompt. And again, make sure to select Kim K2.5. And let's send it. Boom. So, I told it build an interactive fluid simulation in Python with Pygame and Numpy. Implement a grid-based velocity solver. Mouse drag adds die and force to the fluid. Render density as colorful smoke trails. Support multiple colors. add diffusion and advocation, keep it smooth at 60 fps, full screen and reset option. So, this isn't like a simple HTML site, single web page like everyone else is doing. This is a full game that even two, three years ago would take you months to develop. And I'm speaking from experience because when I was 15, I actually built a mobile game from scratch, you know, before any AI. I had to teach myself C, Unity, all that stuff. And it took me like 10 months to build. So, we literally are living in the future. So, as you can see, Kilo code creates a to-do list. it instead of trying to do it all in one shot, which is pretty dumb, it breaks down this complex goal into several smaller tasks and then focuses on them one by one. Okay, so it's asking for permissions to create a folder and start a virtual environment. I'm going to accept that. Next is wants to see into the folder and install the dependencies. I'm going to accept that as well. Continue while running. As you can see on the right, we have the folder created with the necessary codebase structure. And now it's writing the code. You could see that even though Kimuk 2.5 is a powerful model one trillion parameters it is still very fast. So we can see it writing in real time which is also nice user interface because some of the other coding assistants they kind of hide it right they're like loading loading and then they give you a hundreds of lines at once. In Kilo you can see how it's working one line at a time. And again I want to stress this guys we're using one of the best AI models in the world completely for free. It's a open source model Kimik 2.5. It's from Moonshot AAI and it rivals Opus. It even beats Opus on many different benchmarks and Kilo has made it free for the next week. So if you're a user of client and you don't like this sketchy acquisition by OpenAI, consider switching to Kilo. All right, it's asking me to run this. Let's click on run with the requirements txt. So it completed all the to-do list. Okay, that was fast. And now test and verify smooth performance. So let's test this run. It should use Pygame to launch the game and for us to test it. Okay, there it is. This Py game. So how do we do drag add and force color red space change color okay so I need to make some changes so I'm going to use the checkpoints which are very nice in kilo one of the main features I'm going to do restore checkpoints restore files and task confirm and I'm going to continue from here the dragging doesn't really work make sure it properly registers my mouse and renders the fluids so while it's building you can see these checkpoints are being created automatically. So you can jump in at any point instead of losing a lot of progress because you had to reverse to a super earlier point. There's a lot of checkpoints in Kilo and this is why a lot of people love Kilo, right? So now it's implementing my suggestions and also at the top you can see a very clean breakdown of the context window. You can see which prompt, which tool usage cost, how many tokens, how many lines of code we created. This breakdown is amazing. You can see the cache tokens, input output tokens, the context length of this model. Yeah, I wish every single AI tool had such a nice breakdown. Very, very intuitive, very transparent. You know, you know exactly how many tokens are burning. And obviously, right now, it's using a free model, but if you're using a paid model, you can see how much you're spending as well. All right, so I'm actually impressed by the reasoning effort of Kilo because it's still running. It's writing hundreds of lines of code. Unfortunately, I do have to leave now for dinner, but this is what the result will look like. I'll finish it later and put it as edit. As you can see, Kilo is very competent of building any type of apps, not just HTML websites, but real games with Pyode. And again, this model is completely for free. So, if you want to try Kilo code, there's going to be a link below the video. It's a great tool. It's fully open source. You can try it for free and they're giving you Kim K2.5 completely for free. So, go below in the description, try Kilo. And again, thank you to the Kilo team for partnering on this video. That being said, thank you everyone for watching and I wish you a wonderful productive week. See you.